Rasha Aridi

家马是由野马驯化而来的，但是马最早是在何时何地被人类驯化的就没人知道了。最近，科学家终于找到了这个问题的答案。

People have relied on the moderndomestic horses to plow fields （犁 地），travel long distances for millennia and soon. Horses have transformed humansocieties with every step. But scientistshave struggled to answer the seeminglysimple question of when and where theseanimals were domesticated.

It took an international team of morethan 160 scientists to pinpoint the origin ofthe modern horse’s domestication： between4，200 and 4，700 years ago near the Volgaand Don Rivers in southwestern Russia.The team reported their findings in thejournal Nature.

The researchers collected samplesfrom 273 ancient horses that once livedacross Europe and Asia between 50，000and 200 BCE. Using DNA sequencing （排序）， the team created a genetic map thatallowed them to trace the horses’lineage（血統）. They found four separate lineages，but the one most closely related to moderndomestic horses originated in the Volga⁃Don region.

Their genetic map also revealed thatup until about 2，000 BCE， horse popula⁃tions across Europe and Asia were geneti⁃cally diverse. But within just a few centu⁃ries thereafter， the level of variationdropped sharply， and all domestic horsescould be traced back to the population inthe Volga⁃Don region.

This likely happened when peopleliving in the Volga⁃Don region beganbreeding wild horses for domestication andtraveled with them to faraway places. Soonenough， this lineage took over Europe andAsia.“ As they expanded， they replaced allthe previous lineages that were roamingaround Eurasia，” says researcher Ludovic Orlando in France. The horse we knowtoday is the winner， the one we see every⁃where， and the other types are sort of thelosers.

Reading Check

When and where were wild horsesdomesticated？

___________________________________________________________________________________________